Initial Assessment of the Suitability of OTFS for Aircraft-to-Aircraft Channels

Kurzfassung

In this paper, we investigate the suitability of orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) modulation for aircraft-to-aircraft (A2A) channels and compare it with the orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) scheme. To achieve this, the performance of OTFS and OFDM modulations in A2A scenarios is obtained via simulations using models of the OTFS and OFDM communication chains, as well as a geometry-based stochastic model that recreates the A2A channel. The results show that OTFS significantly outperforms OFDM, particularly when considering uncoded transmissions. Our findings suggest that OTFS is better suited for A2A scenarios since it exploits the delay/Doppler properties of the A2A channel, whereas OFDM suffers from its instability in the frequency/time domain.